This year, the Metropolitan Opera is mounting six productions, among a total of eighteen, of new or recent works. Two are carried over from previous seasons; the other four are company premieres. None originates in Europe—five are by American composers (two of them black) and one by a Mexican composer. For a comparable example of attention to the contemporary in the company’s history, we would have to return to the first decades of the last century, when Puccini, Strauss, and assorted verists and post-Wagnerians were of the time, and it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that a new curiosity might turn out to be a repertory-worthy item. As for an equivalent American representation in a season’s offerings, there is no precedent. In those days of a century and more ago, the Met could lean on an audience in which large contingents of first- and second-generation Europeans, most prominently German and Italian, but all still marked by the great influence of 19th-Century Parisian grand opera, helped to fill in the old-money ranks. Opera had long been a high-class component of their home cultures, and while they naturally responded most readily to their native stories and sounds, they were also well accustomed to the interpenetration of repertories, and were assimilated into the broader European assumption of the virtues of opera and classical music. There was no perceived necessity to cater to one ethnicity or another, since opera went with the territory for all.

That assumption settled in for a good long run, and after 140 years^(I) is still the only plausible argument for the existence of a full-scale, full-season repertory opera company in an American city. It did not settle deeply enough, however, to turn opera and classical music into “public goods” in any but indirect ways; nor has it resulted in the creation of anything resembling a native American repertory that might lay the foundation for such a status. With the last influx of European emigrés now two to three generations behind us and the attentions of the rich increasingly drawn elsewhere, it has weakened, perhaps fatally. The canonical repertory is foundering, for reasons that are discussed here in post after post. So the company’s current management has undertaken a program of artificial insemination in place of what was once natural conception—hence the ethnocultural distribution noted above, to which we can add a sexual identity element, as well. This is not a program of audience integration (the management cannot be so unobservant as to suppose that will happen, except at the outermost fringe), but of audience fragmentation, in perfect synchronization with the oft-remarked silo-ing of group identities in our society as a whole. It happens that I have worked in a silo. It is not so bad in the fall, when you’re up at the top near the fresh-air source, and the silage is fresh and relatively dry. But through the winter you work your way down toward the floor, and by spring you are pitching forkfuls of sopping, matted, deeply marinated muck into baskets for trolleying back up to the top, dripping as they go, and the stench is asphyxiating. Moral: the good stuff is right near the top. Also: some silos are near-empty to begin with.